TWO'S COMPANY

The success of the Soviets' Vostok flights led them to embark on a brief but more ambitious program called Voskhod ("sunrise"). This entailed just two flights using a redesigned Vostok space-craft, but each carried more than one cosmonaut at a time.

THE SPACE RACE

The Soviet Union leaped ahead first, with two Sputnik launches—the second of which carried Laika, a live dog. Laika survived for several days before her air supply ran out. The
Soviets then placed the first human into Earth orbit, on
12 April 1961. The spacecraft,
Vostok ("east"), was little more than a cabin in a cannonball, covered entirely by a heat shield. The cosmonaut, Yuri
Gagarin, sat in an ejection seat, which he activated to safely parachute back to Earth.
Ostensibly, the goal of
America's incipient space program, called Project Mercury, was to place astronauts into space, test their reactions and the spacecraft's maneuvering abilities, and return them safely to Earth.

INTO ORBIT

A month after Gagarin's historic mission, the first piloted Mercury flight was made by astronaut Alan Shepard, in space capsule Freedom 7. This was a suborbital flight, traveling beyond Earth's atmosphere without going into orbit.